Tanggangzi: Hot Water and Historic Buildings

Tanggangzi’s visible landscape includes gardens and buildings, but its organising resource is underground water. A bathing place depends on bringing that water to where it will be used, controlling it and maintaining the system. The setting is therefore also a piece of infrastructure.

Anshan’s water authority reported a city-wide geothermal-well monitoring programme in 2023. Across Anshan’s urban area, 30 wells were covered by measurements of extraction and temperature. The two readings describe different parts of the resource: the quantity leaving the ground and the heat of the water being drawn. Bathing depends on both.

Official accounts name Qinglin Villa, Longquan Villa and the Longgong bathing building among Tanggangzi’s historic structures. A villa and a bath serve different rhythms. One organises a stay around rooms and domestic space; the other brings attention to the use and circulation of water. The buildings gave an underground resource a set of rooms, entrances and places to stay.

The hospital’s own history identifies Longgong as an underground bathing building associated with Puyi and Wanrong, the former Qing emperor and his wife. The association belongs to the couple’s lives after the Qing dynasty. A bathing building thus became connected with the memory of an imperial household even after that household had lost its former political role.

A different chapter began in 1950, when three sanatoria were combined to establish Tanggangzi’s hospital. The predecessor institutions served a regional health administration, workers and coal miners. Their merger placed convalescence and rehabilitation at the centre of the site’s institutional identity.

This shift matters to the meaning of its architecture. A retreat associated with distinguished individual guests and a hospital organised around patients require different patterns of use, staffing and care. The old buildings belong to a landscape that continued to acquire new purposes.

The institution now describes a combination of medical rehabilitation, convalescence and leisure uses. Patients and holiday guests bring different purposes to the same hot-spring landscape, whose historic rooms sit within a much larger system of care and accommodation.

A 2008 Liaoning Daily interview hosted by the Chinese Academy of Sciences connects Tanggangzi’s resource surveys with a particular problem. Geologist Wang Delong described how investigation identified additional water resources and helped address the risk that falling groundwater levels would damage mineral-mud deposits. Water extraction and the care of the mud belonged to the same underground system.

The villas and bathing rooms have visible surfaces to repair. The resource beneath them has to be understood through surveys and measurements. Preserving a façade and managing water are different kinds of care, but the character of a hot-spring place depends on both.